Weekend Book Review: If This Were Fiction

Continuing my weekend book review series, I’m choosing If This Were Fiction: A Love Story in Essays, by Jill Christman. These beautifully illuminating essays are about motherhood, laying ghosts to rest, embracing grief, and most of all, love. Love for Jill Christman’s long-ago fiancé, who died young in a car accident; for her children; for Read More

Covered in Love

One of the small delights of spring is watching the arrival of baby birds and the devoted care they receive from their mothers. At the lake I saw a killdeer huddled up on the shore and I thought it strange because they usually skitter along the water’s edge, busily feeding. She finally popped up and Read More

February’s Word of the Month: Connection

I love thinking of connection as energy; something we can actually feel it when it’s there. Connection between lovers, friends, your children, your students, your pets, and nature. Although it varies in its expression, we can feel it all the same. February is the month when we take a day to celebrate love in it’s Read More

A Prayer for the New Year

As we move into the third year of uncertainty, fear and anxiety, As I utter countless requests to make it go away, for things to be different, Give me clarity on what I can do. Let me not cast my hands up in resignation, or bury my face in defeat. Fill me with hope and Read More

One of Billions, Each Essential to the Whole

Each man’s life touches so many other lives. When he isn’t around he leaves an awful hole, doesn’t he? Clarence, It’s a Wonderful Life The end of another year is approaching. Another difficult, prickly year. A year filled with 365 days of occupying space, interacting and isolating, disagreeing and desperately trying to connect. Slogging through Read More

This is hard

I know we all can agree on the observation that life is especially difficult right now. Pandemics, politics, natural disasters, social injustice, general un-ease about the future. I wonder though, will we look back on this time, say 20 years from now and say that it impacted or affected our lives long-term? Or is it Read More

See You Soon

There are only two lasting bequests we can hope to give our children. One of these is roots, the other, wings. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe I started to subtract blocks of time. To quantify my reality so I could digest it. To justify why I personally, as a mom of divorce and shared custody, am Read More

I Don’t Need a Day

Mother’s Day is a few days away, and here’s the status: I have yet to hear from my father or sister regarding plans for my mom (the next day is also her birthday), my two sons will be at an out of town volleyball tournament, and my husband’s siblings have invited him (singular) to lunch Read More

Two Years of Sobriety: It is what it is

I’m glad I didn’t have any expectations around my second soberversary because it looks like it will be a party of one. COVID life is a great teacher of harboring no expectations. And while most people mark March 13 as the day the world shut down, I mark it as another year sober. This day Read More

The Light that is My Son

A few days ago, I traveled to the Bay Area to a small private college tucked away in the affluent town of Atherton. My son, his dad and I had an appointment to meet the men’s volleyball coach and tour the campus. The coach and my son have been exchanging emails since my son sent Read More